快猫短视频

ABRAHAM LINCOLN鈥檚 often bizarre behaviour has at last been explained. The
great US president suffered from mercury poisoning through taking antidepressant
pills laced with the toxic metal.

Lincoln was not always the calm, saintly president beloved of Americans.
Before he took office, he was renowned for his mood swings and bouts of rage. He
could get 鈥渟o angry that he looked like Lucifer in an uncontrollable rage鈥�, his
law partner reported. Others described his sadness and despair.

During this time, he was prescribed a drug known as 鈥渂lue mass鈥�, which
Norbert Hirschhorn, a medical historian based in New York, thinks was probably
used to treat the great man鈥檚 legendary 鈥渕elancholia鈥�.

Hirschhorn was curious to know if the treatment could explain Lincoln鈥檚
strange pre-presidential behaviour. Just a few months after becoming president,
Lincoln stopped taking the drug because, he said, it made him 鈥渃ross鈥�.

With colleagues at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and
Boston University School of Public Health, Hirschhorn prepared the round pellets
of blue mass just as in the old days, with mortar and pestle. The formulation,
taken from an old pharmacopoeia, included liquorice root, rose water, honey,
sugar and dead rose petals as well as finely pummelled mercury.

In the 19th century, mercury was considered an important medicine and was
used generously. It is now known to cause serious neurological and behavioural
problems.

To see how much mercury Lincoln might have ingested from his blue pills, the
researchers put two crushed tablets in sealed bottles with a slightly acidic
solution at body temperature. From the amount that vaporised into the air and
passed through tiny pores in a filter, they found that some 750 micrograms of
mercury per litre of solution would leach into the bloodstream. Someone taking
the recommended dose of one pill two to three times a day would ingest 9000
times the exposure limit currently set by the US Environmental Protection
Agency, the researchers say.

Hirschhorn is convinced the drug was responsible for Lincoln鈥檚 odd behaviour:
鈥淚t caused the very symptoms it was supposed to treat.鈥�